Stover at Yale

I

Dink Stover, freshman, chose his seat in the afternoon express that would soon be rushing him to New Haven and his first glimpse of Yale University. He leisurely divested himself of his trim overcoat, folding it in exact creases and laying it gingerly across the back of his seat; stowed his traveling-bag; smoothed his hair with a masked movement of his gloved hand; pulled down a buckskin vest, opening the lower button; removed his gloves and folded them in his breast pocket, while with the same gesture a careful forefinger, unperceived, assured itself that his lilac silk necktie was in snug contact with the high collar whose points, painfully but in perfect style, attacked his chin. Then, settling, not flopping, down, he completed his preparations for the journey by raising the sharp crease of the trousers one inch over each knee—a legendary precaution which in youth is believed to prevent vulgar bagging. Each movement was executed without haste or embarrassment, but leisurely, with the deliberate savoir faire of the complete man of the world he had become at the terrific age of eighteen.

In front of him spasmodic freshmen arrived, struggling from their overcoats in embarrassed plunges that threatened to leave them publicly in their shirt sleeves. That they imputed to him the superior dignity of an upper classman was pleasurably evident to Stover from their covert respectful glances. He himself felt conscious of a dividing-line. He, too, was a freshman, and yet not of them.

He had just ended three years at Lawrenceville, where from a ridiculous beginning he had fought his way to the captaincy of the football eleven and the vice-presidency of the school. He had been the big man in a big school, and the sovereign responsibilities of that anointed position had been, of course, such that he no longer felt himself a free agent. He had been of the chosen, and not all at once could he divest himself of the idea that his slightest action had a certain public importance. His walk had been studiously imitated by twenty shuffling striplings. His hair, parted on the side, had caused a revolution among the brushes and stirred up innumerable indignant cowlicks. His tricks of speech, his favorite exclamations, had become at once lip-currency. At that time golf and golf-trousers were things of unthinkable daring. He had given his approval, appeared in the baggy breeches, and at once the ban on bloomers had been lifted and the Circle had swarmed with the grotesqueries of variegated legs for the first time boldly revealed. He had stood between the school and its tyrants. He had arrayed himself in circumstantial attire—boiled shirt, high collar, and carefully dusted derby—and appeared before the faculty with solemn, responsible face no less than three separate times, to voice the protest of four hundred future American citizens: first, at the insidious and alarming repetition of an abhorrent article of winter food known as scrag-birds and sinkers; second, to urge the overwhelming necessity of a second sleighing holiday; and, third and most important, firmly to assure the powers that be that the school viewed with indignation and would resist to despair the sudden increase of the already staggering burden of the curriculum.

The middle-aged faculty had listened gravely to the grave expounder of such grave demands, had promised reform and regulation in the matter of the sinkers, granted the holiday, and insufficiently modified the brutal attempt at injecting into the uneager youthful mind a little more of the inconsequential customs of the Greeks and Romans.

The Doctor had honored him with his confidence, consulted him on several intimate matters of school discipline—in fact, most undoubtedly had rather leaned upon him. As he looked back upon the last year at Lawrenceville, he could not help feeling a certain wholesome, pleasant satisfaction. He had held up an honest standard, he had played hard but square, disdained petty offenses, seen to the rigorous bringing up of the younger boys, and, as men of property must lend their support to the church, he had even publicly advised a moderate attention to the long classic route which leads to college. He had been the big man in the big school; what new opportunity lay before him?

In the seat ahead two of his class were exchanging delighted conjectures, and their conversation, coming to his ears clearly through the entangled murmur of the car, began to interest him.

“I say, Schley, you were Hotchkiss, weren’t you?”

“Eight mortal years.”

“Got a good crowd?”

“No wonder-workers, but a couple of good men for the line. What’s your Andover crowd like?”

“We had a daisy bunch, but some of the pearls have been sidetracked to Princeton and Harvard.”

“Bought up, eh?”

“Sure,” said the speaker, with the profoundest conviction.

“Big chance, McNab, for the eleven this year,” said Schley, in a thin, anemic, authoritative sort of way. “Play football yourself?”

“Sure—if anyone will kick me,” said McNab, who in fact had a sort of roly-poly resemblance to the necessary pigskin. “Lord, I’m no strength-breaker. I’m a funny man, sidesplitting joker, regular cut-up—didos and all that sort of thing. What are you out for?”

“A good time first, last, and always.”

“Am I? Just ask me!” said McNab explosively; and in a justly aggrieved tone he added: “Lord, haven’t I slaved like a mule ten years to get there! I don’t know how long it’ll last, but while it does it will be a lulu!”

“My old dad gave me a moral lecture.”

“Sure. Opportunity—character—beauty of the classics—hope to be proud of my son—you’re a man now—”

“That’s it.”

“Sure thing. Lord, we’ll be doing the same twenty-five years from now,” said McNab, who thus logically and to his own satisfaction disposed of this fallacy. He added generously, however, with a wave of his hand: “A father ought to talk that way—the right thing—wouldn’t care a flip of a mule’s tail for my dad if he didn’t. And say, by gravy, he sort of got me, too—damned impressive!”

“Really?”

“Honor bright.” A flicker of reminiscent convictions passed over McNab’s frolicking face. “Yes, and I made a lot of resolutions, too—good resolutions.”

“Come off!”

“Well, that was day before yesterday.”

The train started with a sudden crunching. A curious, excited thrill possessed Stover. He had embarked, and the quick plunge into the darkness of the long tunnel had, to his keenly sentimental imagination, something of the dark transition from one world into another. Behind was the known and the accomplished; ahead the coming of man’s estate and man’s freedom. He was his own master at last, free to go and to come, free to venture and to experience, free to know that strange, guarded mystery—life—and free, knowing it, to choose from among it many ways.

And yet, he felt no lack of preparation. Looking back, he could honestly say to himself that where a year ago he had seen darkly now all was clear. He had found himself. He had gambled. He had consumed surreptitiously at midnight a sufficient quantity of sickening beer. He had consorted with men of uncontrollable passions and gone his steady path. He had loved, hopelessly, madly, with all the intensity and honesty of which he was capable, a woman—a slightly older woman—who had played with the fragile wings of his boy’s illusion and left them wounded; he had fought down that weakness and learned to look on a soft cheek and challenging eye with the calm, amused control of a man, who invincibly henceforth would cast his life among men. There was not much knowledge of life, if any, that could come to him. He did not proclaim it, but quietly, as a great conviction, heritage of sorrow and smashing disillusionments, he knew it was so. He knew it all—he was a man; and this would give him an advantage among his younger fellows in the free struggle for leadership that was now opening to his joyful combative nature.

“It’ll be a good fight, and I’ll win,” he said to himself, and his crossed arms tightened with a quick, savage contraction, as if the idea were something that could be pursued, tackled, and thrown headlong to the ground.

“There’s a couple of fellows from Lawrenceville coming up,” said a voice from a seat behind him. “McCarthy and Stover, they say, are quite wonders.”

“I’ve heard of Stover; end, wasn’t he?”

“Yes; and the team’s going to need ends badly.”

It was the first time he had heard his name published abroad. He sat erect, drawing up one knee and locking his hands over it in a strained clasp. Suddenly the swimming vista of the smoky cars disappeared, rolling up into the tense, crowded, banked arena, with white splotches of human faces, climbing like daisy fields that moved restlessly, nervously stirred by the same expectant tensity with which he stood on the open field waiting for his chance to come.